Did you go to that village called Charokh Kamein? No. No, I was there. I was tied down by this sick Indian who had been bitten by a snake. And I couldn't... And then I was only there a few days because I had been waiting for weeks for a chance to get off that bloody Putumayo River. And when I found I couldn't get to the wild we thought was, I wanted to get to from there, then I just wanted to get out. I understand. Because I was a little tired of the flies. Well, actually, Lachawere was not bad. No, it's on the Lachawere. And the nuns were not... You know, the Mother Superior had quite a history. She was famous in Ecuador. She had... Well, there's a travel... I can't think of the name. There was a tribe, a quite powerful tribe, right on the highway to Ambato. They had a big village and they wanted to put the highway through. And the Ecuadorian government had to treat with the Minister of Public Affairs and Construction of the tribe before he could put the highway through. And those Indians, the Ecuadorian government has been very decent to its Indians. And they were allowed to live there in their own way. They didn't let white people in very much. Very rarely let them in. And but they had... They were very orderly. They did good weaving. They were sort of like James Barrows, their characters. And they brought in their produce. They were good farmers. They were a good community, orderly and decent. And they were left alone. They did not welcome visits. Well, three nuns and a bishop decided to... The church decided to Christianize them. So they went in. And at first, they were treated with great reserve. And they went in to stay three months only. Oh, the Salasacas. The tribe. The tribe. So the Salasacas did not... They were not a murderous tribe. They were not a killer tribe. But they were very reserved and very strong. And they would... They had been... When people came in, they would simply pick them up and throw them out. Well, they couldn't... They didn't do that with the bishop and the nuns. So everyone... Nothing was heard from them. And then they came out and returned because they said they were going to stay three months in the meantime. The nuns had been taken care of. They were sick. They made a sort of hospital. They made... They taught new ways of weaving and a lot of useful things. And so they went back to Quito and stayed there, the capital. And after a couple of weeks, a delegation of Salasacas came and they called on the minister of the interior, who was the only one they'd ever heard about, like the secretary of the interior. And they asked him... They said to him, "We want to buy the nuns. We will give you so much." And he said, "Well, he couldn't sell them the nuns. You couldn't buy a nun." And they thought he was trying to put up the price. So they kept offering more and more, and they were very prosperous people. And finally, they finally got it explained to them. Then they went to the president, who at that time was Gallo Plaza, who was very amiable about... Very interested in Indians and a very decent guy. And he finally explained to them that if they went to the people nuncio, whoever was the head of the Catholic outfit there, I guess an archbishop, they might be able to arrange... They couldn't buy them, but they would come. And so they did. And she was the one... She was the nun, the Mother Superior, La Torrera, was the one who led the nuns in first. She was in charge of the first three. I wonder if it was the same nun that was there when I was there, because she was very... A presence, for sure. I remember that. A quiet, charming woman who had probably been quite beautiful in her youth. Yes, if any of you are interested in the lower Putumayo or the history of the rubber boom or the real deep psychology of this area that we talk about, this book by Michael Taussig called Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man is absolutely... I don't know that. It's an eye-opener. I mean, this guy is not particularly one of us in the sense that he was a Marxist, a labor organizer. His tack was not spiritual. How was he doing that? He went to Colombia as a labor organizer and did that for years before he got interested in Yahé, as they call ayahuasca in Colombia. And he went to the lower Putumayo, to the valley of the Sibundoy, and reports on the history of it in horrific terms, and La Charrera figures in all of that. And also talks about his own experiences with contemporary shamans, many of whom, I'm sure Nicole knew them, I certainly knew them. Did you know that guy, Don Apollinaire, who lived near Florencia, that was Eduardo's friend? Yeah, I met him. But I met him, I think he was in Leticia briefly. And Don Francisco, who was his friend. Anyway, legendary guys. The name of the book is "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man" by Michael Taussig. It's University of Chicago Press. And just eye-opening book, needs to be read, will not be read by many people, but quite a masterpiece, I thought. T-A-U-S-S-I-G. Other questions or issues? Yeah. Do you think a delegation would be willing to come to Washington from any of those tribes to speak for not being defoliated in the drug war? I am sorry to say that most of the people, most of them have been absorbed into the drug culture, into the drug bending. They are now, they've been quite corrupted in the first place. To them, coca has been something you grow. And when they grow it for the cocaineros, well, why not? Because they've always grown it. And then they get a lot of money, which is very bad for them. And they lose all sense of responsibility. They become drunk so easily. It's a strange thing. The American Indian too, takes the alcohol. You see, in their native setting, in their original culture, one of the strange things about South American indigenous people was that there were no alcoholics and no drug addicts, at least in most of South America. It's simply unknown and most anthropologists will tell you this. And I was asked to attend a meeting of, was it the something or other, it was years ago, some psychiatric organization, they wanted to know, they called me and said, "We want you to tell us how the Indians handled alcoholism and drug abuse." And I said, "They don't handle it at all because they haven't got it." And then they said, "You've got to come, now you've got to come." Well, the answer did not please them at all because the answer is discipline. And that was not particularly factionable with the psychiatric outfit. And you see, what happens is if a man, with drug abuse, you have too much respect for the ayahuasca or whatever they're using. Or the mother of the plant will get even with you if you treat it disrespectfully. And anyway, it doesn't do any harm to use it. As for alcohol, they drink a certain amount of Masata, which is alcoholic, mildly, every day, first thing in the morning, it's part of their food. They drink about the same amount that the average French family would drink of wine. And in much the same sense, much the same purpose. And so, if a man, they also, nobody is exempt from a great deal of hard physical labor. The hunting is hard, the house building, everybody must participate in. Doesn't matter if you're the chief, the witch doctor, whatever. You do it. You work with the rest of them. And if a man's loaded, well, he's not going to show up for work, or if he does, he's going to be pretty sloppy at it. And also, you may be at war with the tribe next door. You can't afford to have drunks wandering around. And so, if on a very few rare occasions, someone has done too much drinking, habitually, the first thing they'll do is the older men of the tribe, because the political structure is very weak in the Peruvian tribes at least, they'll get together and they will call him on the carpet and say, "You don't do this anymore. You're not doing your work properly. No more Masato. Stop it." And he will stop. Or if he doesn't, then the next step is everybody laughs at him and points. And that "what will people say?" is terribly important. When you have no possessions to make you proud, you have only what you are. And the respect of your fellow men is perhaps the most valuable thing you can have. So they don't... that hurts badly. If he really doesn't straighten himself out, then there's another meeting and they say, "Get out." And he is forced to leave the tribe under bane of death. He has to go off and live alone in the jungle by himself and he will certainly die. Something will eat him because one man alone cannot survive anywhere. So they don't have alcoholics. And that is one of the very few things that people don't seem to know yet. Do they still not have alcoholics now with the... It is quite different now. Now that... in the first place, they didn't have spirits. They didn't have aguardiente, which is a native rum of very horrible, usually pretty awful stuff. Distilled. Distilled cane juice. And now, especially with the availability of more money, you are finding real drunks amongst the tribes. Because the tribes are going to coca, they get very big pay for it, and they lose interest in the fact that they have become sort of outcasts to a lot of other tribes. And a lot of them turn into drunks too bad. What is it? Is it true that the same people that used psychedelics at one time are now... Yes. But when you talked about the experiments with LSD, how it helped with people that were in... Well, I don't think ayahuasca works quite like LSD. It's not so easily available. Right. Although there were amazing cure, instant cures on ayahuasca. I mean, sometimes they had to do with psychiatric insight. I mean, I remember one night, this woman came to the meeting. She was beautiful, and she had this voice. I mean, it was a supernatural voice. It was just hard to believe. Her name was Slinga, and she had a stomach problem. And we got out in there into the trip, and she was complaining about her stomach problem. And Don Fidel listened to all this, and finally he said, "You're having an affair with a man, and your husband doesn't know, and this is the cause of your stomach problem." And she broke down into tears and said, "Yes, it was so," and so forth and so on. So he was able somehow to discern where she was coming from. It isn't always like that, but sometimes it is. So if you've taken a psychedelic, it doesn't prepare you. I mean, you don't see what the evil elements are of something that's not related. I mean, when alcohol gets into the culture... Well, in the case of these experiments with alcoholics, they were already diagnosed severe alcoholics and had voluntarily entered this experimental treatment program. So they had, to that degree, already made the commitment to sobriety. They were in a treatment program. I don't think it would work for everyone, but I think, you know, in the hands of a skilled psychotherapist, you can make amazing strides against habitual behavior of every sort. Yes, and the ayahuasca thing is a totally... It's a part from... it's a totally different part of the culture, really. The drunks... Well, I don't think they go in for it much. No, and the surest sign you have a bad ayahuasca on your hand is if you have a drunk on your hands. Yes. I mean, a drunk, you shouldn't even bother... There doesn't seem to be any overlap. Yeah. Could you comment on the Datura plant and its role in shaping the metaphysics of Hinduism? Oh, of Hinduism. Well, I'm not really qualified to talk to that. I mean, Datura is used by sadhus to this day. In Benares, you will see in the gutter the broken open pods. And I used... years ago, I lived in Bodenath before there was pavement to it in the Nepal Valley, and on full moon nights, the people would lock all the doors on the lower floors of the houses, and these sadhus would come into town naked with their Shiva tridents in the middle of the night and attempt to break into the stores and stuff intoxicated on Datura. It's very difficult to keep control of that. It's a kind of... I don't consider it a psychedelic. The best description is deliriant. It's a kind of delirious frenzy where your awareness of what's going on seems to extend no more than about five seconds into the past, and you don't know where you are or how you got there, but you're going full tilt. No, I've had a lot of... my focus is fairly narrow. I've tried a lot of things, but many of them only a couple of times because they weren't doing what I wanted them to do. Datura is dangerous. Datura is dangerous. Very dangerous. In that image of the dancing Shiva, the Shiva Nataraja, it's the Datura plant that's up there in the crown of his head. Is it? I know the Shiva Nataraja very well. Yeah, that's one of the things up there in his crown. The Datura magics that seem to me to work the best are not when you go for a full-on crazed intoxication by eating the root or eating the seeds or something, but how about if you just take a flower and wad it up and squeeze one drop out of it onto the middle of your forehead before sleeping at night? Or put a flower... someone, a friend of mine, claimed that the way you take Datura is you plant it by your bedroom window and then you leave your bedroom window open at night. I've also been told that if you put it under your pillow you will sleep beautifully. It isn't true. I tried it. Well, let's see. We're down here after five o'clock. Why don't we take one more question, if there is one, and then... Alan, did you have something? You changed your mind? Anybody? Yeah. Is tolerance built up? Do you build a tolerance to the effect? Of ayahuasca? Of ayahuasca. Well, you take it so rarely that I don't think you build a tolerance. No. I mean, taking it once a week is taking it a lot. You know, I mean, it really... It's even the shamans tell them to take it more than once, maybe twice a week. The one I knew who took it the most took it twice a week. I don't think you build tolerance. You see, this... Here's a... Maybe this is a good point to end on. Another really interesting thing about ayahuasca that distinguishes it from all other psychedelics is that the two things which it runs on, beta-carbolines as MAO inhibitors and DMT to fuel the visions, are both human metabolites on the natch. You have both in your brain all the time anyway, granted not in such radical concentrations, but nevertheless, they're there. So consequently, the brain is very well able to deactivate and harmless... Turn ayahuasca in the brain into harmless byproducts. So it's a very mild thing in that sense. It's the only strong plant hallucinogen I know where you can actually say you feel better the day after you took it than if you hadn't taken it. As you know, most of these things, there's an energy debt and a depletion, but this is not true with ayahuasca. It actually carries you up to a higher energy level and leaves you there forever, as far as anybody can figure out. This is quite amazing. If you ratchet yourself slowly, you enter into, I think, this place that these dieters are probing, this place where self is perceived as world, world is perceived as self, all action is appropriate, everything just unfolds with this kind of magnetic intensity. So I like to think of ayahuasca as merely a shift in the natural chemistry of the brain rather than an actual encounter with an exogenous alkaloid. Okay, well thank you very much. Your attention to these details is very gratifying. This is not easy stuff. We'll be back this evening, hopefully with something a little lighter. Thank you. And thank you, Nicole. You're good. I thank the indulgence of the audience. The audience is intelligent. ...try to move this along and maybe get a kind of consensus. There's no closure, but maybe consensus. And then we'll talk together and answer questions. You're sort of over the hump here this morning. The general layout of the thing is now clear. The idea is that you should now begin to self-direct it so you get input on whatever issues are outstanding for you in all of this. I thought this morning I would just talk a little bit about my view of time and the planetary crisis, the historical crisis, and relate all this back to the ecological crisis. Some people, someone in fact this morning asked me about what did I think about the large number of occult prophecies about the approach of some great phase transition in the life of humanity. Either we are about to experience the glory or be contacted by benevolent extraterrestrials or the coming of the Buddha Maitreya is hailed as just around the corner. Well, rationalism just rejects all this stuff as the fantasy of a paranoid streak in the collective imagination. But it's interesting how many psychedelic travelers return with maps that suggest that there is some immense perturbation ahead of us in time. And since my whole shtick is about stressing the primacy of experience, the primacy of intuition, I think we have to at least take seriously as phenomenologists this testimony, this persistent intuition of an approaching transform. On one level, it doesn't appear irrational at all because we can look around us in the world and see the acceleration of all kinds of tendencies, the rising density of population, the rising strain on the availability of minerals and petrochemical fuels and this sort of thing, the increasing density of electromagnetic radiation from human-generated sources, the increasing density of mutagens in the environment, the increasing availability of information of all sorts on all topics, the factor that I indicated yesterday as being behind the psychedelic revolution. Well, what are we to make of this process of intensification, coalescence, concrescence, knitting together that seems to characterize both the natural and the human world? It obviously cannot be propagated infinitely into the future before all these factors become asymptotic and can't be imaged anymore. At the rate at which we are releasing energy and accelerating availability of information, these things will become infinite sometime after the turn of the century. Well, what does that mean and why does the intuition of it so haunt the fantasy of Western religion and the psychedelic experience? To answer this question, I have sort of had to, I don't know whether I underwent a conversion away from rationalism or a reconversion back to scholasticism, but keep your eyes open on this one because I may be leading you down the primrose path. Nevertheless, it seems to me what we need is a 12-gauge shotgun. No, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called chaotic attractors or dynamics. And this is the notion that many processes are not pushed from behind by the momentum of causoistry as in the ordinary Newtonian model of process, but that there are what he calls attractors or basins of attraction. And these are things which lead processes forward. For instance, a somewhat trivial example would be if we had a large bowl and a marble and every time we released the marble up near the rim of the bowl, we would notice that it unfailingly rolled to the bottom of the bowl and located itself somewhere near the center of the bottom of the bowl. We could say that the bottom of the bowl acts as a basin of attraction for the marble. In other words, the marble finds its most, that its energy state is most at equilibrium when it locates itself in the trough of the bowl. So there is a way of analyzing processes to see them as though they were led rather than pushed. And I think it's fruitful to see human history this way. You see, what we deny as a culture, as a culture of materialist, positivist, reductionists, is the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves or in nature. And so Western science is very concerned to deny what is called telos. Telos is a Greek term for purpose, purpose. The same idea as the attractor that I was trying. If you have a target, if you're driving a car toward a goal, the goal is your telos. It decides how you will steer the car. Well, it has been for the past 150 years extremely fashionable in sociology and biology because of Darwin to deny telos in nature, to say that, you know, any apparent order in nature is made up of the disorder of random mutation meeting the disorder of natural selective processes and these two streams of converging disorder create a kind of apparent or virtual order which is an illusion. This is the orthodox theory. And when you take this Darwinism and put it into historical theory, theory of human processes in time, you get the modern position in academic philosophy about history, which is that it is and the official phrase is trendlessly fluctuating. That's what we're asked to believe we are embedded in, a 10,000-year-old process of trendless fluctuation. In mathematics, this is called a random walk. It means you just go over here a few steps and then you go this way and then you go back. You're like a drunk lurching around in this face space. And this is the highest vision of human purpose that the reductionist vision can offer. Well, what the intuition of religion is, especially Western religion, and I wouldn't even bother to mention it except that it also is the strong intuition of a lot of psychedelic experience, that there is some kind of a tractor in the historical phase space. There is something which is drawing everything toward it. It's like a higher dimensional entity that casts an enormous shadow over the human landscape so that at sitting around campfires 50,000 years ago, people felt this vague tug toward organization, order, cognitive activity, epigenetic activity. Epigenetic activity means coding stuff not in your genes, but in dance, gesture, ritual, and ultimately in clay and on paper and in electronic storage methods. This proliferation of complexity is a response to and an anticipation of this transcendental object at the end of historical process. You see, if it weren't for our presence on this planet, even modern science at its present primitive state could give a fairly good accounting of what's going on, that out of complex polymers arose super complex polymers which were self-replicating and that was life, and then you have an animal population. But the fly in the ointment of this rational model of reality is ourselves. We are clearly imbued with a higher dimension which we call spirit in a way that ordinary matter when imbued with a higher dimension is called life. In other words, we represent a different ontological level in the career of organization because we hope, we despair, we plan, we remember, and we misremember. We lie, we fabricate, we delude ourselves and other people. All of these things are uniquely human functions. Well, I think that shamanism, which is the focus of our concern here, is a kind of anticipating of the whole pattern and that this is really the way to think about shamanism when thinking of it as a force that can steady and complete an individual human life. The shamans are not in history in the same way that we are. By having access to this higher dimension that they go to in their trance states and their states of intoxication, they gain a fractal overview on process, on life. I mean, after all, isn't that what we mean by wisdom? Wisdom is understanding how things really work, how they really work. Life affairs, the raising of children, the managing of corporations, the prosecution of wars, how do these things really work? Not the deluded and fumbling attempts of the proponents of this or that school, but a Taoistic insight into the actual appropriate dynamics of everything. Well, how do you gain that kind of an insight? The answer is, you must have a superior model. You must have a superior model. Now if you believe, you know, that the world is composed of three levels and they are held up on the back of a woman who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space, this is a model of the universe. It can take you a certain distance. But what model of the universe can actually offer reassurance in all kinds of situations? Well, strangely enough, I think that these models come from the frontiers of mathematics, that it is not mere coincidence that the storms of visionary hallucination that the shaman encounters are very much like the storms of form and color that are spewed out of a Cray-3 supercomputer when it conducts a thousand iterations per second inside the Julius set or the Mantelbrot set or one of these other compound complex mathematical objects that we are beginning to see. You see, mathematics up to this point has been a computational science because mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk to describe their objects and consequently an excruciatingly difficult vocabulary kept most people from appreciating what mathematics was about. Now the computer is to modern mathematics like the telescope was to 16th century astronomy. The computer becomes a window into domains of hyper-complex computability that previously could barely even be conceived but that now at a rate of millions approaching billions of iterations per second, Ralph works on the MMPP machine, the multiple parallel processing machine at Goddard Space Flight Center, it does 800 megaflops per second, 800 million floating point decimal calculations per second. Well, you can dream dreams with a machine like that and strangely enough at the edge of the super technology of the Dominator culture at Goddard Space Flight Center with guys, high priests standing around in white coats, when you get it up and running, what you see is what an ayahuasca shaman sees on a Saturday night in the Amazon. You see that you are navigating through a complex higher dimensional phase space where by varying the inputs of amplitude and frequency, in one case using an electronic box, in the other case using the human voice, you sing your way through a mathematical domain which is a higher resonance of reality and you learn how the world really works, how things happen. Well how the hell do they happen? Well on the simplest level they happen like this. They have a beginning, they have a middle and then they die away as an oscillation, a damped oscillation. Now this simple truth to which we all nod ascent is in fact the hardest thing, the hardest swallow there is for the Dominator ego and the Dominator personality because what this simple truth says, things come into being, they achieve their inflorescence and they fade away, is as Heraclitus put it, "Pan t'etre," all flows, nothing lasts, nothing is saved. And this is our glory and our agony that the people we love and the people we hate are swept away by time. Empires, dynasties, continents are swept away by time and yet our search for security is cast in the Dominator culture as a search for permanence. You know, I want to buy a house, I'd like to get my trust fund functioning a little better, I'd like to pay off X, Y and Z, you know, a search for permanence. So what you do when you do that is you set yourself at war against the cosmos which is a heroic stance if you're trying to produce Melvillian opera out of your life. You know, Ahab says in Moby Dick, he's talking to his first mate Starbuck who signifies Christian right reason and he says, he's raving about going after the whale and he says, you know, we'll chase it over both sides of earth and round perdition's flame. And Starbuck says, to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy. And he says, blasphemy, Starbuck? Speak not to me of blasphemy. I would strike out the sun if it insulted me. Or could it do that, then could I do the other, since there is ever a sort of fair play. Well, you know, this is locker room talk. The notion that there is fair play between a man and a nearby star is the finest expression of the dominator ego I can imagine. Of course, you know, the story of Moby Dick can be read on many levels, but finally, it is the story of the submerging of the male ego in the oceans of the unconscious, born to its destruction and transformation by an encounter with the maternal matrix in the form of the vagina dentata of the sperm whale and everything that it symbolized. So I don't think we want to go that way. I don't think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence. Nicole has made the point very eloquently that these people in the Amazon have nothing. The wonderful thing about the Amazon is that nothing lasts. Nothing is worth having. I mean, a book, forget it. Clothing, houses, everything is just swept away by the incessant recycling of material. So all that is permanent are values, personality, strength, honesty, decency, dignity. These are things which can be erected against the flow and have some hope of permanence. So I think shamanism is permission to transcend anxiety by accepting the transience of all form. And this is a truth of the universe that cannot be ignored. So once it is integrated, then it's as though resistance in the electrical circuits that surround your integration into the world begins to fall. You accept that the present moment is the richest apex of being, that on the downside back into the past it shades off into memory and its vagaries. In the future it shades off into a series of adumbrations and anticipations. I think that the shamans gain this tremendous authenticity that you feel in their presence, the good ones, because they have seen the end. They have a model of how process happens and so they don't push and they don't clutch and then energy flows through them. And our civilization has to learn this. And I think that's the way it is. And I think that's the way it is. And I think that's the way it is. 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